Editor’s note: ACCUTE is proud to present the next installment in a series of blog posts highlighting special sessions in ACCUTE’s program at Congress 2017. Today we highlight a panel on   Enrollments in Graduate Programs    hosted by ACCUTE’s Committee for Professional Concerns. 

Monday May 29th, 8:45-10:15 am, Victoria Building 204, Ryerson University

Organizer and Chair: Melissa Dalgleish (SickKids Research Institute/Toronto)

“Enrollments in Graduate Programs” will ask how we can balance institutional demands to recruit more graduate students with the reality that overly high enrollments in Ph.D. programs have produced the current academic job market where our graduate students are being trained largely for precarious academic work and/or for jobs outside of the professoriate. What is the tipping point between too large and too small a cohort of graduate students?

Speakers: Aimée Morrison (Waterloo), Graham Jensen (Dalhousie), Ross Bullen (OCAD), Melissa Dalgleish (SickKids/Toronto)

 Bios:

 Aimée Morrison – I wanted to be a computer scientist until I was the only girl in all my high school courses. So I pursued my second love, English, working my way around to computers again eventually, working in humanities labs at York and Alberta, and on funded electronic text publications at Guelph and at Alberta. My work focuses on popular reception and remediation of computer technologies, as well as on design for digital media. Now I teach literature, digital humanities, history and theory of media, and multimedia practice.

 Graham Jensen is a doctoral candidate at Dalhousie University with interests in modernism, Canadian literature, and the digital humanities. He is a contributor to the forthcoming Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, and has published in Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews, The Bull Calf Review, and Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture.

 Ross Bullen teaches first-year English, children’s literature, American literature, and science fiction at OCAD University in Toronto. He is the Contract Academic Faculty Caucus representative for ACCUTE, and is writing a book on “white elephants” in American literature.

Melissa Dalgleish runs the Research Training Centre in the Research Insititute at the Hospital for Sick Children, where she provides research, career, and professional development support to 1,200 life science graduate students and postdocs affiliated with the University of Toronto. She holds a PhD in English from York University, and her research focuses on the development of poetic and academic communities in Toronto after World War II, and on the life and work of poet and professor Jay Macpherson.